Free CRYERS by Geoff North Page A

Even
after so long the air still smelled slightly rotten. Dead things never stop
stinking, Cobe thought. Lawson stepped around the desk and went to a second
door behind an overturned chair. He squeezed the handle and the clicking,
hissing process started again.
    “You come here a lot?” Trot asked nervously.
    “Only when I need supplies.” He tapped the holster at
his side. Supplies, Cobe gathered, meant guns and ammunition. “Don’t go
worrying yerself. I ain’t seen another howler down here since that first time.”
    Cobe recalled an expression his mother used to say: There’s a first time for everything. His
heart felt heavy as he remembered the sound of her voice. Another thought came
to him: if something happens once, it can
happen again .
    They entered another long hallway with doors on both
sides. There weren’t handles on these ones, only small squares set into the
center with a series of small buttons. Willem went to touch one but remembered
the lawman’s warning. Lawson looked at the boy with a half-smile. “Go on…give
it a try.”
    Willem touched
a button—the one dead center labelled ‘5’—and it beeped. He jumped back and Lawson
made a low grumbling sound. The noise when he laughed sounded painful to Cobe.
Lawson pressed some more buttons and a female voice spoke:
    “Incorrect.
Please enter your six-digit access code again.”
    Trot spun in a
circle and almost fell looking for the voice’s source. None of them—save maybe
the lawman—knew it had come from the tiny round grill below the numbers pad.
Lawson punched in six more random numbers, hit the red button marked ENTER on
the side, and the voice spoke again.
    “Incorrect.
Please enter your six-digit access code again…Warning—This is your third and
final attempt.”
    Lawson looked at Cobe. “You give it a go. Punch some
numbers.”
    Cobe pressed
the numbers one through six and hit ENTER, as the lawman had.
    “Incorrect.
Please seek an ABZE representative for further assistance.”
    “Who’s Abzy?” Trot asked.
    Lawson shrugged
again, implying he didn’t have a clue. Cobe suspected he knew more but couldn’t
be bothered trying to explain it to the simple-minded man. There were more
letters stamped into the metal above the keypad—once black, now faded gray—that
Cobe hadn’t noticed before:
    AARON, JAMES,
D. – ATLANTA, GA
    “Is this where people used to live?”
    “It’s where they came to rest,” Lawson answered
solemnly.
    Trot was twisting the rope around his waist. Sweat
glistened in rings under his eyes. “These were homes?”
    “Resting places…as in, it’s where they put people
after they died…in a sense.”
    Cobe didn’t like the sound of that, and Willem asked, “What
do you mean in a sense ? Yer either
dead or you ain’t.”
    “You would
think so,” Lawson answered quietly and started down the hallway. They passed
more doors with identical keypads set in the middle and different names stamped
above.
    ADAMS, TAMARA, S. –
DALLAS, TX
    ALLAN, DAVID, T. – LOS
ANGELES, CA
    AVRIL, THOMAS, W. – DETROIT, MI
    He stopped at a door another fifty feet down the seemingly endless
corridor. There was a single word above the number pad.
    SMUDGE
    “You don’t need numbers for this
one,” Lawson whispered.
    He started to walk away, and Willem
called to him. “Then show us what’s inside. Maybe it’s got some of them books
we came for.”
    Lawson returned and studied each of
them in turn. “Ain’t no books in there. There ain’t nothin’ in there you want
to see.” That seemed to be the end of it. He was about to turn away again, but
stopped. It appeared to Cobe like he was considering something—something he was
extremely uncomfortable with. “Maybe if I show the three of you what’s in
there, you’ll understand why I need you to stick close.” He pressed the ENTER
button quickly, as if another second of thought might cause him to change his
mind again. Click…Hiss. The door
slowly swung out. A